The present application relates to material deposition technologies, and more specifically to high throughput deposition apparatus.
Material deposition in vacuum is widely used in photovoltaic cells and panels, window glass coating, flat panel display manufacturing, coating on flexible substrates, hard disk coating, industrial surface coating, semiconductor wafer processing, and other applications.
High volume production systems used for these applications typically comprise of interconnected box-shaped chambers that accept one or two rows of substrates. The deposition sources typically have a material usage rates ranging from 20 percent with low cost planar targets to 50% with high cost rotary targets.
There is therefore a need for higher throughput deposition systems that can provide uniform deposition on a higher number of substrates with reduced material waste.